Brush Your Teeth

Flash Fiction.

“You never brush before bed,” she said moments after she spit out mouthwash, seconds before she’d take her place in the tacitly agreed upon side of my queen-sized sleep machine, where she’d place her cold feet under my warm legs, which felt nice. Familiar.

She had a point. But I only didn’t do this when she was around. Some nights she spent at her place, I’d even get crazy and bust out the floss before bedtime.

This was, admittedly, a strange quirk. That’s not at all lost on me. I was sometimes (three or even four nights a week) sacrificing my faithfulness to what is basically the minimum standard for tooth care and oral hygiene as dictated by the American Dental Association, the direction to brush your teeth both morning and evening, to avoid the potential of discomfort that might be unlikely to ever come in the first place.

I didn’t brush at night when she was around because I didn’t want to be like those couples on movies and TV shows who have these important and sometimes tense and/or confrontational conversations while they’re brushing their teeth together before calling it a night.

Stop for a second and consider how many times you’ve seen this type of thing take place on screen.

I’ll wait.

Once you think about it, it’s more than you would have assumed, right?

Bet there’s, like, a montage of those scenes playing in your head now.

It’s kind of like how when you buy a certain model of a car you start to see similar vehicles all the time when you never really noticed them much before.

Anyway.

I was afraid at even the prospect of such conversations. The precursor to pillow talk that would lead to the kind of pillow talk that would then keep my mind racing away from sleep through the entire night.

I didn’t brush my teeth because I didn’t want to become another trope.

So instead I just stayed in bed, not taking proper care of myself.

Wait. Fuck. That’s a trope too, isn’t it?

Is anything or anyone truly original anymore?